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Ariel Ricci is the executive director of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations, where Morgan Pottle Urquhart is the acting policy and communications director. Juana Rodriguez Vazquez, executive director of Mano en Mano, is a commissioner for the commission, serving in a seat for an organization representing Latino and migrant communities.
No matter who we are, where we come from or the color of our skin, we believe that people deserve fair pay and fair treatment for their work. But today, farmworkers in Maine lack the basic workers’ rights to address unfair treatment and unsafe conditions where they exist. This systemic exploitation of farmworkers — who are disproportionately people of color — hurts us all, including our farms.
Agricultural workers in Maine have historically been excluded from labor laws through exemptions at both the state and federal levels. Currently, agricultural workers are not subject to Maine’s minimum wage, overtime and other worker protection laws, such as the ability to discuss wages and working conditions. Under current Maine law, agricultural workers can be fired for making any attempt to improve conditions at their workplace.
The exemption of agricultural workers from Maine’s labor laws has a disproportionate negative impact on Mainers of color, particularly Indigenous and Latino people, who are more likely to work in the state’s agricultural sector. That’s why the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations supported three bills this session that would have improved conditions for farmworkers in Maine.
After the bills had public hearings and two committee work sessions — already more than the majority of bills that are considered in the Legislature — the sponsor of two of those bills, House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland, hosted meetings with the Maine Farm Bureau, the Maine Potato Board, the Maine Wild Blueberry Commission and individual farmers to attempt to find a consensus. As a result of those meetings, the legislation was altered, and the only provisions remaining would have established farmworkers as employees under Maine law, making them eligible to be paid the state’s minimum wage. There would have been no right to overtime pay, no right to organize for better working conditions or even to talk with each other about these things without threat of retaliation. Making farmworkers eligible for the state’s minimum wage is the absolute least we can do to start to work towards equity for those that do the hard work of harvesting the food we eat.
Even after these meetings and concessions, Gov. Janet Mills convened three further stakeholder meetings to hear from agricultural lobby groups and other stakeholders over the last four months. Despite this extraordinary level of engagement, where the Maine Potato Board and other agricultural lobbying groups had a seat at the table and nearly all of the provisions of the original bills were negotiated out, the agriculture industry representatives are now claiming that there wasn’t enough time to consider the complexities of the remaining bill. It appears that when groups benefit from an unjust system, they have no incentive to negotiate changes to that system.
After this scaled down version of LD 398, “An Act to Make Agricultural Workers and Other Related Workers Employees under the Wage and Hour Laws,” was enacted by the Maine Legislature, the governor was lobbied by the Maine Potato Board and their allies to veto the bill.
These protections are already in place in many other states across our country. Maine is one of 19 states that does not apply its minimum wage laws to most farmworkers. Farmworkers and advocates on their behalf have been working for years to enact them. This wasn’t a case of settling for half a loaf, or even a slice — farmworkers would have gotten breadcrumbs from LD 398, but even those crumbs were considered too much for the people who do backbreaking work to put food on our tables.
The Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations was established in 2019 and began its work in late 2021, after receiving its first funding. The Permanent Commission has a mission to examine racial disparities across all systems with a goal of improving the status and outcomes for historically disadvantaged populations in the state.
